In a narrow and elongated solar, where there is already a house is set on building a small studio that can be used both as a paint shop to house occasional weekends for the children of the owners.
The starting point of the project was given by the economics, should be an economically viable project on a shoestring (70,000 €).
This factor limited the possibilities of both structural and finishing, so we started from a very clear premise: we had to work with industry in the area (if possible, the same people), and technical solutions to those were accustomed, traditional solutions adopted in typical buildings in the area.
This premise led us to work with load-bearing walls, one-way slabs, aluminum windows of reasonable dimensions and finishes as the Dredge conventional painting.
From there, the studio-apartment of 90 m2, is divided into two distinct sectors: an open and transparent to the outside through a porch cane, and a more intimate space, with two rooms and a small bathroom. The entire program fits into a perimeter wall with a light load slightly higher than 6 meters.
The open space contains the living room, dining room and kitchen. This space is projected on maximizing its total surface so that the heart of the house, the space where they perform most daily functions, as pleasant as possible. The rooms, however, are considered as core areas, with at least enough space for sleep and a small table.
The bathroom and the kitchen is reduced to essentials, the bath containing also the space for washing machine and boiler of hot water and cooking as a minimum bar in the space of the room.
The legislation requires the municipality to make a sloping roof, so that raises a set of inclinations recalling the profile of the mountains on the horizon. These tendencies are applicable to both the main building and the porch cane around the northwest and southeast facades, giving a formal continuity between the main building and the porch.
Given the great suffering heatstroke cover during the summer months, take advantage of this inclination to generate a flow of air into a ventilated chamber housing the traditional way of the Eixample in Barcelona: forged over a second deck stands in this case a corrugated, which generates an air of about 30 cm. This camera takes advantage of the inclination of the building, through perforations in the front, allowing the entry of air through the bottom of the deck and the departure from the top. Thus, the air chamber is heated by heat stroke, rises and exits through the perforations high, sucking fresh air from the bottom.
The slope of the roof also is used to collect rainwater from the surface, which is driven to the center of the building and ejected by a gargoyle on a water surface. This tank is connected to the garden next door, so that it operates entirely with reclaimed rainwater.
The two facades of the house under the porch are painted with green and white vertical stripes, so that the shadow of the rod produces a set of textures that change with the different solar orientations during the day. This is not just a formal device also helps integrate the building into the surrounding vegetation, but is also a response to the type of finish facade with which we were, quote, forced to use. The Dredge mortar on brick wall tile cracks easily and absorbs bad the possible movements of the facade, which is almost impossible to avoid the appearance of cracks and crevices. When such a facade is painted evenly, cracks are only drawing on the surface, so that they are terribly exposed. The fact superimposed on an extremely contrasted, in this case a bar code white and green, are, as a matter of intensity, the cracks are not so apparent, and is blurred behind the drawing.
Thus, white and green vertical bars, and allows a more durable building, produced a game-changing appearance of the facades according to the solar incidence on the porch cane and it’s shadow on the building, integrating the forest that begins at this point of the site and at the same time, are an allegory to the low housing prices.
In the rest of the facades, which are against the dense forest surrounding the house, painted the same color green bars, so that first thing in the morning and late afternoon, the sun casts shadows flush the trees on them, mimicking in contiguous forest greens.
The porch cane river surrounding the main facades of the building consists of a light metal structure formed by square tubing, profiles T and L by position. The rod is supported and attached by wires stretched and flanges with a very simple installation that allows the owner to change the rod approximately every 2 years since this material obviously has a limited life. The extremely low price of this material (120 € for the whole building) allows the replacement of this is not an economic hurdle.
